Grand Rounds is “the weekly summary of the best healthcare writing online”. I’ve hosted this medical blog carnival twice and considered it a great honor to do so.

I have submitted a lot of posts to the Grand Rounds. Often I even wrote a special blog post to fit the theme if there was one. Almost all my submissions have been accepted. I really enjoyed the compilations. There was a lot of outstanding creativity and originality in how the links to the blogs were “aggregated” and highlighted.

Usually I only read those posts that seemed the most interesting to me (the summary thus works as a filter). But through the Grand Rounds I read posts that I would never have read and I learned about bloggers I never heard of.

Why am I talking in the past tense? The Grand Round is still there, isn’t it?!

Yes, it is still there (luckily), but the organizers are thinking of a “rejuvenation of this old dinosaur”. As the previous host, Margaret Polaneczky explained

“… Grand Rounds has dropped a bit off all of our radars. Many, if not most of us have abandoned the old RSS feed to hang out on Twitter, where our online community has grown from a few dozen bloggers to feeds and followers in the hundreds and even thousands.”

One of the measures is that the Grand Rounds editions should be more concise and only include the “best posts”.

I too go for quality, and think one should carefully select contributors (and hosts), but is the 7-year-old dinosaur to be saved by chopping him in pieces? Should we only refer to 10 posts at the max and put the message in a tweet-format like Margaret did in an experiment?
I was glad that Margaret gave a good old fashioned long introduction in the Dinosaur’s style, for that was what I read, NOT the tweets. Sorry tweets are NOT a nice compilation. They are difficult to read.
It also isn’t a solution to tweet the individual links, because a lot of those individual tweets will be missed by most of the potential readers. It is not coherent either. The strength of the Grand Rounds is in the compilation, in the way the host makes the posts digestible. I would say: let the host present the posts in an attractive way and let the reader do the selection and digestion.

Also important: how many of us will write blog posts specially for the Grand Rounds if there is a chance of 2 in 3 that it will be rejected?

It is true that the Grand Rounds is less popular than a few years ago and it is harder to get hosts. But that may partly have to do with advertising. My first Grand Rounds got far more hits than the second one, mainly because we sent a notice to great blogs that linked to us, like Instapundit (853 hits alone) and there was an interview with the host announcing the Grand Rounds at MEDSCAPE. In this way the main intended audience (non-blogging lay people) were also reached. The second time my post was just found by a handful of people checking the edition plus this blog own readers.(I have to admit that this last Grand Rounds Edition might have been better if it had been more concise, but at least one person (Pranab of Scepticemia) spend 2 hours in reading almost all the posts of the round-up. So it wasn’t for nothing)

If some busy clinicians can be persuaded to host The Grand Rounds using a shorter format, that is fine. And it is good to be more concise and leave out what isn’t of high quality. But why make it a rule to include just 10 or 12? Even more important, don’t change blog posts for tweets. For I don’t think, as Margaret passed on, that the concept of the individual blog has been sometimes “overshadowed by Twitter and Facebook, whose continual unending stream demands our constant attention, lest we miss something important that someone said or re-said…” Even I have given up to constantly follow all streams, and I suppose the same is true for most clinicians, nurses etc. Lets not replace posts by tweets but lets use Twitter and Facebook to promote the Grand Rounds and augment its radius.

Grand Rounds is evolving as a more focused, curated publication. Rather than a 4,000 word chain-o-links, Nick Genes, Val Jones and others felt that a focused collection of recommendations would be more manageable for both readers and hosts. This is Grand Rounds for quality rather than link love.

It isn’t contacts, followers, friends, subscriptions, readers, link love, mentions, or people’s attention. It’s time. With time I can have all of these things.

“Link love” and “chain-o-links” undervalue what blog carnivals are about. Perhaps some bloggers just want to be linked to, but most want to be read, and that is the entire idea behind the blog carnival. I can’t imagine that the blog hosts aim to include as many links as possible. At the most it is lovefor particular posts not “link love” perse.

Changing the format to tweets (♬♫) will only increase the link/text ratio. Links will become more prominent.

I would rather go for the ♥♥-links*, because I ♥ to blog and I ♥ to read good stuff.

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* Note that ♥♥-links is not the same as link-♥

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Here is a short Twitter Discussion about the new approach. I fully agree with Ves Dimov viewpoint, especially the last tweet.

Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message (utterance or expression) or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted (…) as signs, or conveyed as signals by waves. Information is any kind of event that affects the state of a dynamic system. (…) Moreover, the concept of information is closely related to notions of … communication.. data… knowledge, meaning, .. perception. .. and especially entropy.

I am pleased that there were plenty submissions on the topic. I love the creative way the bloggers used the theme “information”. In line with the theme the information will be brought to you according to the Rule of Entropy, seemingly chaotic. Still all information is meaningful and often a pleasure to read. Please Enjoy!

IMAGES are a great way to tell information, especially if you don’t understand the language. The picture above is from the Kama Sutra, an ancient Indian Hindu work on human sexual behavior in Sanskrit literature. Did you know the original Kama Sutra is not all about sex and does not have any pictures? Only words, no graphic. And sadly, as a text, it isn’t widely read.

Another great radiologist, also from India, isVijay Sadasivam (@scanman). No recent posts, but at Scanman’s Casebook you will find an archive of interesting radiological cases, in the form of case reports.

Pranab (aka Skepticdoctor)makes an urgent appeal to fellow Indians to help Amit Gupta and other Indian people to get a bone marrow transplant when they need one. Amit has Acute Leukemia, but South Asians are very poorly represented in bone marrow registries, so his odds of getting a match off the registries in the US are slim. The chances are even worse for the less well-off Indians. Read at Scepticemiahow you can help. For Amit, for India, for you, or worse, someone you love more than yourself….

Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. And this is also true for other audiovisual arts.

Yet, some Medical Bloggers master the art of storytelling, they convey of events in words, images and sounds. And here, words have the same powerful strength. Often these posts of these storytellers are about communication and they know how to communicate that.

One of the master storytellers is Bongi, a general surgeon from South Africa. He submitted the post die taal (that language), which is clearly about communication but in a language (“Afrikaans”), that I can understand, but many of you don’t. Therefore I choose another post at Other Things Amanzi, which is also about communication: “It’s all in the detail”

Another great storyteller, and the winner of the best literary medical blog category of Medgadget contest in 2009 and 2010 is StorytellERdoc. In the beautiful post The Reminder – EKG #6, he tells us how the 6th abnormal EKG in a presentation of one of the residents, brought back memories to the technician who made that EKG: “There is something more important about this EKG than it’s tracing, I began” ….

Another blogger, unique in its kind, “raps” his stories. Yes I’m talking about Zubin, better known as ZDoggMD. Watch how he and his mates colleagues rap “Doctors Today!” where he “informs” folks of what it’s like to actually practice primary care medicine on the front lines. Want to know more about this medical rapper, then listen to this radio interview with a med-student run radio (RadioRounds). It’s about using video to “inform” patients and healthcare providers about health-related issues in a humorous way.

Movies are also a good way to “tell a story” and pass information. Ramona Bates reviews the Lifetime’s Movie “Five” at her blog Suture for a Living. Five is an anthology of five short very emotional (but not sentimental) films exploring the impact of breast cancer on people’s lives.

We have had pictures, music, videos and movies as data carriers. But here is a post that is based on the good old book. Dr. Deborah Serani (who has a blog of her own: Dr. Deb: Psychological Perspectives) submits a review from PsychCentralabout her new book “Living with Depression.” My first intuitive response: how can a psychologist or psychoanalyst write about “living with“. But it seems that Deborah Serani has faced a lifelong struggle with depression herself. This memoir/self help book seems a great resource for anyone in the health field looking for information about mood disorders, treatments and recommendations. The review makes me want to read this book.

Twitter is seen as offering more noise than signal, but there’s valid medical data that can be uncovered. Ryan DuBosar at the ACP internist blog highlights how a researcher uses Twitter to track attitudes about vaccination and how they correlate with vaccination rates. The study adds to a growing body of evidence that social networking can be used to track diseases and other natural disasters that affect public health.

Mayo Clinic started using social media for communication with patients well before all the recent hype and it organized tweetcamps back in 2009.David Harlow made the pilgrimage to Rochester, MN and spoke at the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media’s Health Care Social Media Summit last week. According to David “A ton of information was presented, through traditional channels and through some multimedia demos as well”. He shares conference highlights in this post at HealthBlawg, like “It is impossible to transplant a successful program from one location to another without taking into account myriad local conditions”. And “health care providers will have to do more with less”. Therefore e-Patient Dave suggests in his closing keynote to “Let Patients Help”.

Nicholas Fogelson of Academic OB/GYN notes that an operating room without incentives is very expensive. He proposes to install a cheap digital toteboard in every operating room in the USA, that would read how many dollars have been spent on that case at that moment. The idea is that surgeons who know exactly what they are spending, would compete to spend less wherever they could.

According to Bryan Vartabedian the social and technological innovations cause doctors to slowly change from analog physicians to digital physicians. He mentions 6 differences between these doctors. The first is that the information consumption of the digital physician is web-based, while the analog doctor consumes information through paper books and journals, often saying curious things like, “I like the smell of paper” or “I’ve gotta be able to hold it.” By the way, Bryan’s blog 33 Charts is all about social media and medicine.

Blogging doctors are digital doctors per definition, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to discuss things and see each other in real life. Dr. Val of Better Health and cofounder of this Grand Rounds announces a blog conference in Los Angeles, the Blog World Expo, on November 4th, 2011. Her talk is about “physicians engaging online in social health”, but she is actually hoping that many members of the medical blogging community will be out there IRL! At her blog you can get discount tickets.

Many physicians have an online presence, but do they really use social media for decision making, wonders Chris Nickson. From his post and the ensuing reactions atLife in the Fast Lane it appears that tools like Twitter and the comments sections on blogs enable a constant, ongoing dialogue with emergency physicians and critical care experts around the world regarding puzzling clinical issues. Rarely, however, there is a direct ‘tweet’ for clinical help. Rather Twitter contributes to the serendipitously finding of relevant and significant information.

We now arrive at a clinical librarian topic, medical information via databases, journals and the role of EBM.

The first post bridges this and the previous topic. Jon Brassey is co-founder of the TRIP-database, a clinical search tool designed to rapidly identify the highest quality clinical evidence for clinical practice. At his blog Liberating the Literature he expresses his view that search is -at best- a partial solution. He is passionate about answering clinician’s questions and would rather see an answer machine than a search engine. Jon is very tempted to allow users to upload their own Q&As, thereby creating an open repository of clinical Q&As. I am more skeptical, because this kind of EBM sharing might be at the expense of the quality of evidence.

What do you think? Can social media and EBM reinforce each other or not? Please tweet your ideas to Anabel Bentley (@doctorblogs at Twitter) who is giving a talk at Evidence 2011 (#ev2011) tomorrow on social media & EBM and asks for your input. You might also want to read my older post about The Web 2.0-EBM Medicine split.

The invitation to join the editorial board of a relatively new online, open access journal, without receiving any compensation triggered Skeptic Scalpelto ponder about the tangible benefits of open access publishers (coined as “predatory open access” by a commenter) and about how many journals are really needed? Who has the time or interest to read 25 journals on a relatively specialized topic? And what about the quality of the articles in all these journals?

Many people think screening is always a good thing and will prevent or cure a disease. But not every test is a good test and often there are both harms and benefits. It is difficult for patients to understand the true value of tests.

This month is breast cancer awareness month, meant to highlight issues of breast cancer and try to call attention to new discoveries about breast cancer. Personally I have mixed feelings about the pink ribbon exploitation of this month”, but David Gorky at Science Based Medicine points at a worse misuse: quacks seize the opportunity to spread their message against science-based modalities for the detection and treatment of breast cancer and to promote their “alternative” methods. (see Fig. above).

In his post “Want go Dutch…or German…or French?” at HUB’s LIST of medical fun factsHerbert Mathewson, MD argues that “Before trying to copy other nation’s health care systems we should probably actually learn about them.” The outcomes of the Dutch switch from a system of mandatory social insurance administered by nonprofit sick funds to mandatory basic insurance that citizens had to buy from private insurance companies (“managed competition”) are appalling! I can imagine that the idea that the Dutch reforms provide a successful model for U.S. Medicare seems bizarre. (Herbert’s post is based on a NEJM article “Sobering Lessons from the Netherlands”).

Robert Centor of Medrants simply submitted one sentence:“I am a physician, not a provider, and Groopman agrees. – http://www.medrants.com/archives/6505″This distinction between physicians and providers is similar to the distinction between consumers and patients, and I agree.

Rich Fogoros (DrRich) of The Covert Rationing Blogdiscusses a recent article in the New York Times about whether nurses with a doctorate degree ought to be addressed as “doctor.” Most doctors think calling a nurse “doctor” is not appropriate and confusing for patients.
A medical student running the blog The Reflex Hammeragrees: medical students with a doctoral degree don’t introduce themselves as “Doctor” to a patient either, don’t they? Dr Rich, an old hand, thinks otherwise. While it is indeed comforting that doctors should be so concerned about patients knowing everything they’re supposed to know, the fact (according to dr. Rich) is that the doctor-nurse controversy is a distraction.

Hospital antimicrobial stewardship programs are prompting more appropriate prescribing of antibiotics, leading to improved patient care, less microbial resistance and lower costs, three studies show. The trick is how to convey this information so hospitals will implement these programs, as only one-third of U.S. facilities currently do. Read more at ACP Hospitalist, in the second contribution ofRyan DuBosar to this round.

Louise of the Colorado Health Insurer Insider summarizes her submission quite aptly: “Our submission is about the new Health Insurance Exchanges that will be starting here in the US soon. This post discusses how consumers will get INFORMATION about the health plans through the exchanges. Currently, consumers get their information through health insurance brokers or directly through the insurance carrier. If there are people to answer questions for consumers with the exchanges, how will the plans be more or less expensive”

The post that Reflex Hammer submitted (the one above was just picked by me) concerns informing young children about vegetables. A few weeks ago he and a classmate were invited to give a presentation to 1st graders at an inner-city school. Wishing to combat obesity, they developed a lesson plan about vegetables. They were heartened by how much the adorable kids already knew about vegetables and how enthusiastic they became about eating their greens. An adorable initiative and a great post to end this Grand Rounds, since it illustrates the importance of doctors who enjoy to take their time to inform people.

I just want to mention one other post, by Mike Cadogan at Life at the fast Lane. Mike doesn’t blog a lot lately, because he is preparing presentations for an important Emergency Medicine meeting. But Mike does share some of this journey with us in The 11 Phases Of Grief Presentation Preparation. Reading these 11 stages, the similarities between writing a lecture and writing for Grand Rounds struck me. Except that beer had to be replaced by wine….

Mike is in stage 7-9, I am in stage 10-11. Stage 11 is Evaluation: What will I do different next time? First, I won’t go for two blog carnivals at the same time, I won’t plan a Grand Round when I’m away for the weekend* (I just need a lot of time) and I should refrain from adding posts that weren’t even submitted….

Will you remind me next time?

I hope that you enjoyed this Grand Rounds and that it wasn’t too much information. I enjoyed reading and compiling all our posts!

Grand Rounds is a weekly round up of the best health blog posts on the Internet. Each week a different blogger takes turns hosting and summarizing the best submissions of the week.

October 25th I will be your host. Again…. for I have hosted Grand Rounds once before. Then we made a trip around the library.

This time the theme will be “INFORMATION”.

Difficult? Not at all. Almost anything may fit into this theme. Examples: Searching for information, information overload, lack of information, misinformation, the hardest information you had to share, the way the doctor (mis)informed you about a disease, how pharma deals with information…. The way information is interpreted (you can also choose psychiatric topics here). Nice or noteworthy articles or books you read. Or you may review an app. Web2.0 tools. Social Media. Data carriers. Ah well, if you sell it the right way and your post is of good quality, I will accept almost everything…..

I have one slight problem though. Grand Rounds is traveling all the way from India to the Netherlands this week and I am away for the weekend. You would help me tremendously if you submit your post this Tuesday or Wednesday!

Official Deadline: Sunday October 23rd, 20.00 pm Central European Time. This is 14.00 EDT (NY)

Please Email your submissions to:

And include:

“Submission for Grand Rounds” in the subject line of your e-mail.

Your name (blog author), the name of your blog, and the URL of your specific blog-post submission.

A short summary (1 to 3 sentences) of your blog post.

I look forward to receiving your submissions and featuring them here next week. Thank you!

In the old days, bloggers whose posts were included in the Grand Rounds would link to that post from their own blog. Grand Rounds, for those who are not familiar, is a weekly compilation of the best of the medical blogosphere.

I used to refer to the Grand Rounds once in a while, but quit this habit to prevent that my own posts would get lost amidst the summarizing and/or referring posts.

But I will make an exception for a Grand Rounds edition that is written by a man who combines modern practice along with classic craftsmanship (rather called “old fartness” by the author concerned).

First of all I was surprised to find a very good summary of my own post. A post about a search topic, which I was rather surprised to find included in the first place. Please let me share this excellent & quite funny plain language summary of my post.

Jaqueline writes Laika’s MedLiblog, a blog dedicated to medical information science. She submits a post entitled, “PubMed’s Higher Sensitivity than OVID MEDLINE… & other Published Clichés,” in which she shows how medical researchers doing literature searches for, among other things, meta-analyses, will stumble upon various “anomalies” in their searches of the PubMed and OVID databases, and then write additional, CV-padding papers about those anomalies. Jaqueline points out that these so-called “anomalies” are actually well-documented “clichés,” which are well-known to information specialists and anyone else who is competent in doing comprehensive literature searches. In other words, Jaqueline has documented that these meta-analysis researchers are rank amateurs at doing the most critical step in conducting meta-analyses – searching the literature for all the appropriate published studies. DrRich has always mistrusted meta-analyses, and Jaqueline has helpfully identified yet another reason to justify such mistrust. He thanks Jaqueline, and whoever planted those database anomalies which allow us to identify potentially incompetent meta-analysis researchers.

Second, I am always happy if a Grand Round not only quotes the posts of the great medical bloggers I already know, but also includes posts of bloggers who are new to me. Today I’ve found two new blogs I’ve subscribed to.

The First is Sharp incisions(… random cuts in the life of a fledgling medical student), a blog started in 2010 by a second year medical student. He/she wrote an affecting post in 5 parts about the harvesting of six vital organs for transplantation from a patient who has been declared brain dead. (First part starts here)

I stood beside the surgeon, watching, but through the sterile drape, I reached for the patient’s hand, squeezed it, and silently said,

‘Thank you. Your legacy lives on in these lives you’ve saved.’

One heart. Two lungs. A liver. Two kidneys.

Six futures.

Another blog I subscribed to is In My Humble Opinion (A primary care physician’s thoughts on medicine and life), written by Jordan Grumet (@jordangrumet at Twitter), an Internal Medicine physician. This blog already started in 2008 (just like this blog).

And if you don’t have time to write about this topic, you may still find the survey useful, as well as the views of others on this topic. So check out Martin’s blog Gobbledygookonce in a while to see if the blog edition has been posted.

Note [1]: If you have already submitted a post to the carnival, or would like to write about another theme, we will take care that your post (if relevant) will be included in this or the next edition. You can always submit here.

Note [2]: Would you like to host “Medical Information Matters” at your blog? Please comment here or write to: laika dot spoetnik at gmail dot com. We need hosts for June, July, August and September (submission deadline first Saturday of every month, posting on the next Tuesday)

In DecemberApril I am hosting the blog carnival Medical Information Matters, a blog carnival about – medical information. The deadline for submissions is next Tuesdaythis weekend, and I have already received a number of interesting posts. As Christmas is right around the corner, I thought that a good theme for the carnival would be a wish list for better medical information. This could mean many different things, e.g. a database that covers a specific area, better access to fulltext papers or clinical trial results, etc. Please submit your posts here.

So, if you have written (or are able to write) a post which fits in with this topic – or fits in with the broader theme of “medical information” or “medical library matters”, please submit the URL (permalink) of your postHEREat the Blog Carnival.

You may also submit a post of someone else. Tips are also appreciated.

It has been long since I have posted a Kaleidoscope post with a “kaleidoscope” of facts, findings, views and news gathered over the last 1-2 weeks. There have been only 2 editions: Kaleidoscope 1 (2009 wk 47) and 2 (2010 wk 31).

Here is some recommended reading from the previous two weeks.Benlysta (belimumab) approved by FDA for treatment of lupus.

Belimumab is the first new lupus drug approved in 56 years! Thus, potentially good news for patients suffering from the serious auto-immunity disease SLE (systemic lupus erythematosus). Belimumab needs to be administered once monthly via the intravenous route. It is a fully human monoclonal antibody specifically designed to inhibit B-lymphocyte stimulator (BLyS™), thereby reducing the number of circulating B cells, and the produced ds-DNA antibodies (which are characteristic for lupus).Two clinical trials showed that more patients experienced less disease activity when treated with belimumab compared to placebo. Data suggested that some patients had less severe flares, and some reduced their steroid doses (not an impressive difference using “eyeballing”). Patients were selected with signs of B-cell hyperactivity and with fairly stable, but active disease. Belimumab was ineffective in Blacks, which are hit hardest by the disease. The most serious side effect were infections: 3 deaths in the belimumab groups were due to infections.Thus, overall the efficacy seems limited. Belimumab only benefits 35% of the patients with not the worst form of the disease. But for these patients it is a step forward.

Recent research has shown, that a single night of sleep deprivation alters decision making independent from a shift in attention: most volunteers moved from seeking to minimize the effect of the worst loss to seeking increased reward. This change towards risky decision making was correlated with an increased brain activity in brain regions that assess positive outcomes (ventromedial prefrontal activation) and a simultaneous decreased activation in the brain areas that process negative outcomes (anterior insula). This was assessed by functional MRI.

One co-author (Chee) noted that “casinos often take steps to encourage risk-seeking behavior — providing free alcohol, flashy lights and sounds, and converting money into abstractions like chips or electronic credits”

Interestingly, Chee also linked their findings to empirical evidence that long work hours for medical residents increased the number of accidents. Is a similar mechanism involved?

There are many terrific posts included. A few posts I want to mention shortly.

First a post by a woman who diagnosed hers and her sons’ disease after numerous tests. Her sons’ pediatrician only tried to reassure, so it seems. (“don’t worry…”).

I was also moved by the South African surgeon, Bongi, who tells the tragic story of a missed diagnosis that still haunts him. “For every surgeon has a graveyard hidden away somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind…”

….”And facing Cooper’s parents for the first time after his passing was strangely difficult for me. When he was alive I always had a plan. Every sign, symptom, and problem had a systematic approach. But when faced with the most inconceivable process, I found myself awkwardly at odds with how to handle the dialog”….

Other Medical Blogs

Another of my recent fav blogs is the blog of cardiologist, dr. Wes. Two recent posts I would especially like to recommend.

Oh, and a big congrats to Aaron Tay for his Library Journal movers & Shakers award. Please read why he deserves this award. What impresses me the most is the way he involves users and converts unhappy users “into strong supporters of the library”. I would recommend all librarians to follow him on Twitter (@aarontay) and to regularly read his blog Musings about Librarianship. Web 2.0

It has been five years since Twitter was launched when one of its founders, Jack Dorsey, tweeted “just setting up my twttr’. Now Twitter nearly has 200 million users who now post more than a billion tweets every week. (see Twitter Blog)

Just the other week Twitter has told developers to stop building apps. It is not exactly clear what this will mean. According to The Next Web it is to prevent confusion of consumers third-party Twitter clients and because of privacy issues. According to i-programmer the decision is mainly driven by the desire of Twitter to be in control of its API and the data that its users create (as to maximize its -future- revenue). I hope it won’t affect Twitter-clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, which perform much better (in my view) than Twitter.com.